Aargh, this sucks. You know that cool thingamajig JB or somebody added here on the boards to make it easy to listen to mp3s and watch YouTube videos without leaving the boards? That's Yahoo's WebPlayer, and apparently after Sunday it's not going to work anymore.

Lame! Anybody got ideas for a replacement? I know my way around some JavaScript media players, but they are more complicated to integrate than WebPlayer. WebPlayer could probably be cloned pretty easily though, which means there are probably already some clones out there. (I haven't yet searched for a replacement.)

I was always a bit wary about embedding third-party javascript on my sites for two reasons: 1) privacy issues (Javascript stuff can hook into pretty much anything on a webpage, so the third-party script vendors can do a LOT of damage if you have password forms etc.) and 2) integrity issues. You can never predict how the third-party javascript might change (and the WebPlayer did change a few times, breaking things). And that change might be disappearing completely, as Yahoo! has reminded us.

Back when it was the del.icio.us playtagger it was easy enough to self-host, so I got accustomed to that. Then Yahoo! Yahoo!ified it and I decided that Yahoo! was benevolent enough to keep going with it, and they added enough features to make it worthwhile.

I wonder if anyone still has the old playtagger source sitting around. Just remove the del.icio.us parts and you've got yourself a nice little inline web player. Although that was Flash-based. But the basic "form a playlist from the A HREF links on a page, create an HTML5 <audio> tag player" thing isn't thaaaaaat hard to do either.